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The Greatness of Abraham Lincoln 

By 
Rev. William E. Barton, D.D., LL.D. 

Author of "The Soul of Abraham Lincoln," "The Paternity of 
Abraham Lincoln," etc. 

MEN whom the world counts great have been conveniently 
grouped into three classes — those who are born great, 
those who attain to greatness, and those who have great- 
ness thrust upon them. The first two groups may in reality be 
one — those who, born with inherent qualities of greatness, attain 
to its realization and recognition by their own innate power and 
its fortunate adaptation to opportunity. When a truly great man 
becomes the advocate of a great cause and meets a great situa- 
tion adequately, worthily and triumphantly, the patient ages rise 
from their somnolence and rejoice. 

The men who have greatness thrust upon them live not long 
in the rarified atmosphere to which they are suddenly elevated. 
They must die soon or they outlive their fame. Some of them, 
fortunately caught, by death in the brief hour of their publicity, 
are suddenly enrolled among the notable men of their generation ; 
but even so, they lengthen but little the period in which they are 
accounted notable. Die they soon or die they late, their fame 
fades, and they pass in due time to their own place in oblivion. 
But they who, being great, match their quality against the chal- 
lenging front of opportunity, achieve a distinction which grows 
toward immortality. Like a snow-capped mountain, hidden at 
close view by its own foot-hills and emerging to seem at first only 
a possibly higher elevation in the range, they tower higher as the 
years recede, dwarfing all lesser hills of their contemporaries, until 
they stand as if in solitary grandeur; and while the plain is yet 
dark, they greet with radiant crest the dawn of succeeding gen- 
erations. Of these men, greatest of all men of his generation, 
was Abraham Lincoln. 

3 



We measure the stature of Lincoln by the shadow which he 
casts over succeeding generations. It is nothing less than colossal. 
But while his figure bulks vast, his personality grows dim in out- 
line as seen through the mists of the years. The memory of the 
men who knew him is not yet obliterated, but the halo about 
him refracts the light of calm judgment; and a clear vision of 
his qualities is lost in indiscriminate eulogy. Those who knew 
him constitute now a small and diminishing group, and these for 
the most part have added to the dim outline of their actual 
experiences of Lincoln the color of later reflection or tradition. 
Abraham Lincoln is already in good part a mythical character. 
To him are attributed many utterances which have no certain 
place in his authentic speeches or writings. Concerning him 
are current past any hope of eradication incidents which prob- 
ably never occurred. Poetry and song and dramatic art and 
the myth-making tendency of the human mind are all at work, 
and have been active for a half century. He must have been 
a great man who could inspire such inventions; but can we 
discover the hiding of his power? Can we find at this late date 
the real Abraham Lincoln? And when we find him, will he still 
seem to us a truly great man? 

I. The Greatness of His Stature 

Lincoln was a tall man. In any company his height alone made 
him conspicuous. This feature he accentuated by the long black 
coat and tall stiff hat which he habitually wore. He recognized 
the value of his own physical stature. He liked to measure him- 
self, back to back, against other tall men, and was pleased if 
by a fraction of an inch he over-topped them. Some notable men 
who called upon him on matters of importance were surprised to 
have him open the conversation by an invitation to measure 
height with the President ; but that method at least prepared the 
way for a conversation face to face. 

Of Lincoln's stature, Herndon says: "In his eleventh year he 
began that marvelous and rapid growth for which he was so 
noted in the Pigeon Creek settlement. ' ' He quotes from a manu- 
script letter from David Turnham: 

"As he shot up, he seemed to change in appearance and action. 
Although quick-witted and ready with an answer, he began to 
exhibit deep thoughtfulness, and was so often lost in studied 
reflection we could not help noticing the strange turn in his 
actions. He disclosed rare timidity and sensitiveness, especially 

4 



in the presence of men and women, and, although cheerful enough 
in the presence of the boys, he did not appear to seek our com 
pany as earnestly as before." 

Herndon comments on this letter: 

"It was only the development of every boy. Nature was a 
little abrupt in the case of Abraham Lincoln.. She tossed him 
from the nimbleness of boyhood to the gravity of manhood in a 
single night." (Herndon 's Lincoln, i, p. 25.) 

Before he finished his brief schooling in Indiana, Lincoln had 
attained his full height. Herndon says: 

' ' He was now over six feet high, and was growing at a tre- 
mendous rate, for he added two inches more before the close of 
his seventeenth year, thus reaching the limit of his stature. He 
weighed in the region of a hundred and sixty pounds, was wiry, 
vigorous and strong. His feet and hands were large; arms and 
legs long and in striking contrast with his slender trunk and 
small head." 

He quotes Katy Roby, afterward Mrs. Allen Gentry, a school- 
mate: 

"His skin was shrivelled and yellow. His shoes, when he had 
any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, 
and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or a coon. His breeches 
were baggy, and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of 
his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and nar- 
row." (Herndon 's Lincoln, i, 37-38.) 

Lincoln's sudden attainment of manhood stature, and its cor- 
responding mental effect, were marked at the time and commented 
upon afterward. It was almost the last thing he ever did sud- 
denly. He grew so fast that he reached the stature of manhood 
tired. We shall not go far wrong if we accept without attempt 
to qualify it the frank affirmation of his neighbors and employers 
that he was lazy. He inherited little energy either from Thomas 
Lincoln or the Hanks family — and what he inherited he used up 
in his rapid growth. Thereafter he moved and thought slowly. 

Herndon 's description of Lincoln's personal appearance in 
mature life is classic. Of few other men have we so clear and 
discriminating a portrayal: 

"Mr. Lincoln was six feet four inches high, and when he left 
the city (of Springfield) for Washington was fifty-one years old, 
having good health and no gray hairs, or few, if any, on his head. 
He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast 
to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing, he leaned 

5 



forward — was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclined to 
the consumptive build. His usual weight was one hundred and 
eighty pounds. His organization — rather his structure and func- 
tions — worked slowly. His blood had to run a long distance from 
his heart to the extremities of his frame, and his nerve force had 
to travel through dry ground a long distance before the muscles 
were obedient to his will. His structure was loose and leathery; 
his body was shrunk and shrivelled; he had dark skin, dark hair, 
and looked woe-struck. The whole man, body and mind, worked 
slowly, as if it needed oiling. Physically he was a very power- 
ful man, lifting with ease four hundred pounds, and in one case 
six hundred pounds. His mind was like his body, and worked 
slowly and strongly. Hence there was very little bodily or mental 
wear and tear in him. This peculiarity gave him a great advan- 
tage over other men in public life. No man in America — 
scarcely a man in the world — could have stood what Lincoln did 
in Washington and survived more than one term of the Presidency. 

"When he walked, he moved cautiously but firmly; his long 
arms and giant hands hung down by his side. He walked with 
even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He put his 
whole foot down on the ground at once, not landing on his heel; 
he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, 
and hence he had no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory 
— catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and 
down his person, and thus keeping them from locating. The first 
impression of a stranger, or a man who did not observe closely, 
was that his walk implied shrewdness or cunning — that he was 
a 'tricky man,' but in reality, it was the walk of caution and 
firmness. 

"In sitting down on a common chair he was no taller than 
ordinary men. His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally 
long, and in undue proportion to the remainder of his body. It 
was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men. 

"Mr. Lincoln's head was long, and tall from the base of the 
brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his 
forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's, and 
unlike Webster's, which was almost perpendicular. The size of 
his hat, measured at the hatter's block, was seven and one-eighth, 
his head being, from ear to ear, six and one-half inches, and 
from the front to the back of the brain, eight inches. Thus 
measured it was not below the medium size. His forehead was 
narrow but high; his hair dark, almost black, and lay floating 

6 



when his fingers or the wind left it, piled up at random. His 
cheek bones were high, sharp and prominent; his jaws were long 
and up-curved; his nose was long, blunt, and a little awry toward 
the right eye; his chin was sharp and up-curved; his eyebrows 
cropped out like a large rock in the brow of a hill; his long, 
sallow face was wrinkled and dry, with a hair here and there on 
the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were large and 
ran out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly by 
heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hang- 
ing, and under-curved, while his chin reached for the lip up- 
curved; his neck was neat and trim, his head being well balanced 
on it; there was the loose mole on the right cheek, and Adam's 
apple on his throat. 

"Thus stood, walked, acted and looked Abraham Lincoln. He 
was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; 
he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-looking and 
plain-acting. He had no pomp, display or dignity, so-called. He 
appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. He was a sad- 
looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked." 
(Herndon's Lincoln, iii, pp. 585-588.) 

We possess a very large body of material that enables us to 
judge of the personal appearance of Lincoln. He emerged into 
prominence as the daguerreotype Avas coming into common use. 
Many photographers desired to make pictures of him, and Lincoln 
was not averse to having his picture taken. More than a hundred 
authentic and original photographs exist, showing his appearance 
from early in his career in Springfield to a few days before his 
death. 

We have also oil portraits in considerable number. Soon after 
Lincoln's election artists flocked to Springfield. They set up 
their easels in the vacant legislative hall of the old Capitol and 
Lincoln was accustomed to sit for perhaps an hour each morning 
as they worked, reading his mail as he posed for them. Most, 
if not all, of these portraits are preserved. Some of them have 
merit and all of them have historic interest. 

Of portraits after he became President, we have one in some 
respects the most notable of all, and surrounded most by re- 
markable associations, that of Prank B. Carpenter. The likeness 
is preserved in the detail portrait and in the notable painting of 
the Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the events 
which accompanied it are recorded in Carpenter's book, "Six 
Months in the White House." 

7 



We are peculiarly fortunate in possessing the life-mask of Lin- 
coln, as well as the casts of his hands — the former made in Chicago 
by Leonard Volk, a Chicago sculptor in the spring before his 
nomination for the Presidency, the latter made in Springfield, 
by the same artist, within a week after Lincoln's nomination. 
Volk was not a gTeat sculptor, and he valued these casts for the 
sake of a statue which he made and which possessed no great 
merit. But he was a remarkably good workman in plastic material, 
and the casts were well made, and they preserve to all coming 
time not simply the bony structure of hands and head, but the 
living lineaments of Abraham Lincoln. To this undoubtedly 
accurate record of his features and his hands must every sculptor 
and artist refer. 

Down to the time of his election to the Presidency, Mr. Lincoln 
wore no beard. A letter received from a little girl, Grace Bedell, 
suggested the wearing of a beard, and Lincoln accepted the sug- 
gestion. This decision has caused widespread regret, for the 
beard added little that was decorative, and did not conceal the 
lower lip, which was Lincoln's least attractive feature, but hid 
the well-modeled chin and a jaw that was at once kind and firm. 
To say that Lincoln was tall, gaunt and awkward does not ac- 
curately describe him. There was in his ungainliness a certain 
symmetry. He said of himself that for a clumsy fellow he was 
rather sure-footed. On election night in 1864, when the White 
House was almost deserted because so many Washington residents 
had gone home to vote, he told his secretaries and a little group 
who were rejoicing with him over the election returns, how on a 
dark night after his defeat by Douglas he had slipped on a 
muddy path but caught himself before he went down, and how he 
went on with a kind of gleeful application of the incident to his 
defeat—' ' It 's a slip, but not a fall ! ' ' 

To call Lincoln graceful would be untrue, but there was a 
certain co-ordination of his ungainlinesses which made for an ap- 
proach to grace. Especially was this true when he grew animated 
in discourse. His features lit up ; his eyes glowed ; he forgot 
what he was doing with his great hands; he towered aloft and 
moved forward in his argument with a power of personality that 
caused men to forget that he was otherwise than graceful. 

Hon. Joseph H. Choate, when a young man, heard Lincoln in 
his Cooper Union address. Years afterward he wrote out his 
impressions of the evening: 

"He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain 



people among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there 
was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his clothes hung 
awkwardly on his giant form; his face was of a dark pallor 
without the slightest tinge of color; his seamed and rugged fea- 
tures bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set 
eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave 
little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from fhe 
lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked 
to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease." 

He was ill at ease, and painfully aware of his clothes, but he 
did not continue thus to be embarrassed. Mr. Choate continued 
his description: 

"When he spoke, he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice 
rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. 
For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of 
his hand. * * * It was marvelous to see how this untutored 
man, by mere self -discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, 
had outgrown all meretricious acts and found his way to the 
grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. ' ' 

Lincoln 's voice was not deep and strong as seemed to befit a 
tall man. It was high and thin — almost grotesquely so. In his 
debates with Douglas, the feature which almost every surviving 
listener seems to have preserved is the contrast between the two 
men as to stature and sound. Douglas was a little man with a 
big voice — Lincoln a big man with a little voice. But Douglas 
abused his deep, rich baritone, and his voice wore out, and toward 
the end of the campaign could not be heard by a large portion of 
his audience; but Lincoln's thin, high voice carried well, and after 
he lost his self -consciousness was sufficiently flexible to be effective 
and persuasive. 

People misjudged Lincoln who set him down as a clown or a 
simple rustic. A second and more careful look at him showed 
elements of dignity and nobility. Lincoln was great and capable 
of looking great. His portrait as we have become familiar with 
it is the portrait of a great man. Of him we could almost say, 
as the Duke of Wellington said after he had seen Webster: "Sir, 
no man could be as great as Daniel Webster looked!" 

They also reckoned without their host who attempted on short 
acquaintance an undue familiarity with Lincoln. Familiar as he 
was, there was about, him a certain dignity that protected him 
from too free approach. 

The man who now declares that he habitually addressed Lincoln 

9 



by his first name, whether in full or with abbreviation, probably 
draws upon his imagination rather than his memory. Lincoln 'a 
neighbors did not address him as "Abraham" or "Abe." They 
called him "Mr. Lincoln." 

II. The Greatness of His Intellect 

Abraham Lincoln possessed a great mind. Born in the midst of 
penury and destitution, not only of educational advantages but 
of incentive to study, he obtained by force of will and strength 
of mental power a mind disciplined and of commanding ability. 

He had a logical mind. He wanted, as he said, to be able to 
bound his subject, North, South, East and West. He had a 
fondness for mechanics which he transferred to his mental proc- 
esses; he insisted on knowing the connections of truths, their 
causes and effects. He would be content with nothing short of 
truth. 

Where he inherited this power and aptitude has given rise to 
much discussion. He appears to have inherited from his father 
a certain imperturbability and good nature; a slowness of mental 
and physical movement, and an ability to discern a humorous 
quality in men and events. From his mother, as he believed, 
he inherited his power of analysis, his intellectual alertness, his 
gift of logic. 

In his earlier environment there was, as he said, "absolutely 
nothing" to stimulate within him the love of learning; yet the 
love of learning was strong within him. Much did he owe to 
solitude and the power of reflection. 

Yet his was a nature strongly social, and under that was in- 
herent in him a great human love which could not have been 
evoked except in association and competition with men. 

Of his mental development in youth, Herndon wrote: 

' ' The intellectual fire burned slowly, but with a steady and 
intense glow. Although denied the requisite training of the school- 
room, he was none the less competent to cope with those who 
had undergone that discipline. No one had a more retentive 
memory. If he read or heard a good thing it never escaped 
him. His powers of concentration were intense, and in the ability 
to strip bare a proposition he was unexcelled. His thoughtful 
and investigating mind dug down after ideas and never stopped 
till bottom facts were reached. With such a mental equipment 
the day was destined to come when the world would need the 
services of his intellect and heart. That he was equal to the 
great task when the demand came is but another striking proof 

10 



of the grandeur of his character." (Herndon's Lincoln, i, p. 
44— 1st ed.) 

Of Lincoln's habits of study while at New Salem, Robert B. 
Rutledge wrote to William II. Herndon a paper which Herndon 
used in part and which the nephew of Robert Rutledge has fur- 
nished me in full. He says: 

"While clerking in the store or serving as postmaster lie would 
apply himself as opportunity offered to his studies, if it was 
but five minutes' time — would open his book which he always 
kept at hand, study it, reciting to himself, then entertain the 
company present or wait on a customer without apparent annoy- 
ance from the interruption. I have frequently seen him reading 
while walking along the streets. Occasionally he would become 
absorbed with his book ; would stop and stand for a few moments, 
then walk on, or pass from one house to another, or from one 
squad or crowd of men to another. He was apparently seeking 
amusement; and with his thoughtful face and ill-fitting clothes 
was the last man we would have singled out for a student. 
* * * He never appeared to be a hard student, and he seemed 
to master his studies with little effort until he commenced the 
study of the law. In that he was wholly engrossed, and began 
for the first time to avoid the society of men, in order that he 
might have more time for study. He was not what is usually 
termed a quick-witted man, although he would usually arrive at 
his conclusions very readily. He seemed invariably to reflect and 
deliberate, and never acted from impulse so far as to force a 
wrong conclusion on a subject of any moment." (Herndon's 
Lincoln, i, 113.) 

1 ' The weird and melancholy association of eloquence and poetry 
had a strong fascination for Lincoln's mind," said Hon. Lawrence 
Weldon, at a bar-meeting held in the U. S. Court in Springfield in 
June, 1865. Tasteful composition, either of prose or poetry, which 
faithfully contrasted the realities of eternity with the unstable 
and fickle fortunes of time, made a strong impression on his 
mind. In the indulgence of this taste it is related of him that 
the poem "Immortality" he knew by rote and appreciated very 
highly. He had a strange liking for the verses, and they bear 
a just resemblance to his fortune." (Herndon, iii, p. 626.) 

Horace Greeley, in one of his brutally frank letters to Lincoln, 
told him plainly that he was not considered a really great man. 
The nation counted him in 1860 a political accident. Of his Cab- 
inet, Seward, Chase and Stanton all let him know at one time 
or another that they considered him their inferior. But he was 

11 



great enough to compel their respect, not by the fiat of his political 
position above them, but by sheer force of an intellectual su- 
periority which compelled even Seward to write to his wife: 

"The President is the best of us." 

There are two opposing theories of the origin of great men. 
One of them, derived from Buckle and his school, attempts to 
account for all men, both individually and racially, by their 
environment and the conditions of the times in which they live. 
The other, of whose conviction Carlyle is the indignant spokesman, 
explains not the man by his times, but his times by the man. 
Emerson agreed with Carlyle, and went even farther. The Atlan- 
tic Ocean is there because nothing smaller would answer the pur- 
poses of Columbus; he needed a large world and a round world 
and a wide ocean to express what was inherent in himself. The 
world and all external conditions are to be explained by the 
man, and not the man by his world. 

Something of this latter theory must be held as to genius. It 
has its own laws. It produces its own exponents in manner and 
form which cannot be predicted. It is impossible to explain 
Robert Burns without Scotland, but Scotland alone does not 
explain Burns. Scotland has been on the map for a long time, 
and still there is but one Bobert Burns. Henry Ward Beecher 
stood at the foot of his class in Amherst College. Since his day 
many men in Amherst College have stood at the foot of the 
class, and it is not known that that environment has produced 
any more Beeehers. Socrates was the product of the life and 
spirit of Athens, but Athens has long since given up the expecta- 
tion of producing men of Socratic mind by the wholesale. 

No great man can be understood entirely apart from his en- 
vironment, and if he could, it would be unfair both to him and 
to his environment thus to interpret him; but that which enables 
a man to dominate and rise above his environment is in the man 
himself. 

Lincoln would have been a great man in almost any environ- 
ment. Gray is not the only man who has had occasion to 
moralize concerning the "mute inglorious Miltons" or the Crom- 
wells guiltless of their country 's blood and of anything else good 
or bad enough to be mentioned. A few of them might have 
won fame and fortune in more favorable environment, but most 
of them in any other place would have continued mute and in- 
glorious. 

In statecraft, as in certain other of the nobler vocations, there 
are few absolute standards by which to measure greatness or 

12 



success. A civil engineer erects a bridge; it stands or falls, and 
With it stands or falls his success in his profession. A manu- 
facturer establishes a business; it pays a profit or sustains a loss, 
and the balance-sheet shows it at the end of each year. A lawyer 
either wins his case or loses it, and he knows which as soon as 
the jury is polled, or the court reads its decision. The soldier 
either wins his battle or is defeated, and no end of official lying 
will permanently conceal the truth. But the teacher, the editor, 
the preacher and the statesman, however soon or keenly they may 
be made aware of failures in their respective fields, have not the 
same swift and sure credentials of success. The teacher must live 
long to see his pupils come to fame, and when they do so, he 
may have to divide his share of the glory with other influences 
which deserve it less. The editor may die before he knows that 
an editorial of his, pasted into a farm-house scrap-book, in- 
fluenced for power or righteousness a life. The preacher must 
measure his success by evidences far more intangible than the 
size either of his congregation or his salary. 

The politician also must wait long for lasting evidence of his 
greatness. He cannot measure it by the election returns, nor 
by the number of his re-elections. His success in the political 
arena is seldom undisputed, and he must courageously wait long 
before the results of the policies in which he is able to carry 
out his purposes bear their full and legitimate fruit and his wis- 
dom is conceded and assured. Few men in politics live to see the 
result of this testing. A statesman has been defined as a dead 
politician; he is more than that — he is a politician whose work, 
viewed in the retrospect, attains a common acceptance of justifica- 
tion as wise, righteous, constructive and permanent. 

Lincoln died while the judgment concerning his work was still 
in the balance, tilted indeed in his favor by the successful ter- 
mination of the war, but with a final and favorable decision to be 
rendered not by his contemporaries alone, but also by posterity; 
not by America only, but by the world. 

A sure test of Lincoln's intellectual processes is afforded by his 
literary style. The free use of words is no assurance of the 
ability to think. But Lincoln's clear, clean-cut, accurate and 
transparent use of English is the indubitable evidence of a mind 
working with precision, with conviction and with authority. Only 
a mind strong and clear and logical and well-disciplined could have 
expressed itself as Lincoln's did in pure, accurate and forceful 
language. 

There is legitimate ground for honest difference of opinion 

13 



whether Abraham Lincoln at the time of his election was a suf- 
ficiently great man to have been elected President, or whether, 
having in him the inarticulate elements of greatness, he was 
educated up to his responsibilities. Henry Adams, seeing him 
on the night of his first inaugural ball, painfully conscious of 
his white gloves and showing little evidence that he was conscious 
of anything else, may have had some justification for his opinion 
that Lincoln had not as yet the requisite training for his task. 
But surely he was not justified in his further inference that no 
training that could come to him would ever be sufficient. 

Lincoln declared that he did not claim to have controlled 
events, but that he had been controlled by them. He spoke in 
part truly, but that was not the whole truth. In a very large 
sense he did control events, and his control was that of a man 
who trusted his own intellectual judgments and was capable of 
compelling other men to accept them and in the main to ap- 
prove them. 

Lincoln possessed a mind capable of indefinite growth. Essen- 
tially one with the people among whom he was born and with 
whom he spent the years of his boyhood and youth, he early dis- 
played a capacity for development that carried him beyond the 
horizon and above the level of the life of his associates. This 
he accomplished without at any point breaking his associations 
with them. His root remained in the soil of his associations, but 
he grew until the terminal end of his ideal was far above his 
associations. 

He learned by his disappointments. Peter the Great is said 
to have accepted his early defeats in battle with a kind of glee. 
' ' They are teaching me how to fight, " he is reported to have said. 
Lincoln fulfilled in his own career the old Latin proverb that it 
is lawful to learn from the enemy. He was educated by his defeats. 
After he suffered humiliation at the hands of Stanton in the reaper 
case, he returned from Cincinnati to Illinois "to study law." 
He was already one of the foremost men at the Illinois bar, but 
he had learned something from a cruel disappointment, and he 
did not fail to make use of what he had learned. He returned 
from his one term in Congress and mastered Euclid. He dis- 
ciplined himself through his disappointments. 

Also, he grew through his successes. They increased his self- 
confidence, without spoiling him with vanity. 

Thus disciplined by both failure and success, Lincoln grew 
mentally, and he was growing to the very end of his life. His 
mind was a growing, a retentive, a noble, a truly great mind. 

14 



III. The Greatness in the Breadth of His Sympathies 

We cannot understand Lincoln without an appreciation of the 
range and power of his sympathies. 

It is related of him that when he began to compose essays for 
use in the backwoods school of Indiana, one of the first, and 
perhaps the very first, of his attempts at literature was one on 
cruelty to animals. In it he especially protested against the 
practice of putting hot coals on the back of a turtle, as boys 
sometimes did, in order to make the turtle thrust out its head. 
His crossing the cold stream to carry over a dog that had been 
left behind and was afraid of the chilly water; his dismounting 
to pull out a pig that was mired deep in the mud, are kindred 
evidences of his sympathies. He once in his youth shot and 
killed a wild turkey, and never thereafter killed any larger game. 
He was not a hunter; his father appears never to have been a 
hunter. He seems not to have cared to take life needlessly. It 
does not appear to have troubled him as a young man to have 
assisted the farmers at their work of hog-killing, but this neces- 
sary work for the providing of food appears to have had a dif- 
ferent place in his thought and feeling from that of taking life 
for sport. 

Lincoln's sympathy sometimes caused him to be imposed upon. 
It was hard for him to resist an appeal on behalf of youth, old 
age or womanhood. A woman dressed in widow's garb made an 
immediate appeal to his sympathies, and there is good reason to 
believe that some of the sable millinery worn by those who came 
to him was borrowed for the occasion. 

Abraham Lincoln was great as an orator. Without this element 
of greatness he could never have risen to fame. He was great in 
the high quality of his public leadership. The political leader 
has no such swift and sure test of success as has the military 
leader or the captain of industry. His success is something far 
less tangible, as is the success of all moral leadership. Every 
great leader of men must have one of two qualities. He must 
either have vision to enable him to see farther and clearer than 
other men, or he must have the ability to discern the mind of 
the people and adapt himself to their moods, wills and changing 
purposes. Few, very few, are the leaders who possess both these 
qualities, and almost none hold them in an equal balance. But 
Abraham Lincoln possessed them both, and that to a marked 
degree. 

15 



Generals fumed and Stanton swore because of his readiness to 
pardon common soldiers sentenced to die for infraction of neces- 
sary military rules. 

But it would be a mistake to assume that Lincoln's sympathies 
were balanced by no consideration of firmness and stern reso- 
lution. Lincoln permitted the military prisons to be filled with 
men and women under suspicion of treason, and saw to it that 
those prisons were in charge of very stern men. He permitted the 
writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in order that where it was 
necessary very relentless judgment might be measured out against 
people who were lengthening the war or rendering its result less 
certain — some of them eminent and respectable people. 

Many of the stories told of his gentleness are mythical. But 
Lincoln did issue pardons, many of them, and in the judgment 
of officers of the army, more than he ought, for the release of 
common soldiers charged with offenses which it seemed to him 
might be condoned. He did not see, he said, that it would do 
those men any good to shoot them. But he had no such mercy 
on "the wily agitator" or the respectable copperhead who dis- 
couraged enlistments or gave comfort to the enemy. His tender- 
ness of heart possessed a counterbalancing quality of stern justice 
— a kind of relentlessness the more terrible because he was so kind. 

Lincoln approached the question of slavery under the impulse 
of a threefold predisposition. First, he had something of the 
feeling of race superiority which belonged to a man of southern 
birth, reared in an environment essentially southern in birth and 
tradition. In the second place, he had a mighty and compelling 
sense of justice. For the same reason that he would not willingly 
be a slave, he would not be a master. In the third he had a 
compelling sympathy. This quality is expressed in his letter to 
Joshua F. Speed under date of August 24, 1855. Speed was an 
old friend, and in regard to slavery a southerner. Lincoln had 
re-entered politics, still believing himself a Whig and being very 
much mistaken about it, for he was no longer a Whig. He wrote : 

' ' I acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Con- 
stitution in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor 
creatures hunted down and carried back to their stripes and 
unrequited toil; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841 you 
and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from 
Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember that from Louisville to 
the mouth of the Ohio there were aboard ten or a dozen slaves, 
shackled together with irons. The sight was a constant torment 
to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio 

16 



or the slave border. Tt is not fair for you to assume that I 
have no interest in a thing that h;is and continually exercises the 
power to make me miserable. ' ' 

He was talking of his own right, as a non-slaveholder living 
in a free state, to an interest in slavery such as might lead him 
to an active opposition. The root of his personal interest, as 
here set forth, was in the power of slavery to make him miserable 
in its strong appeal to his personal sympathy. 

Great in his sympathies, Lincoln was greater in his patience. 
He was patient with generals who lost battles which they ought 
to have won, and who shirked when they ought to have been 
fighting. He was patient with Mead, though sorely tried because 
he did not follow Lee after Gettysburg; patient with Burnside 
and Hooker and Pope. He was patient with his Cabinet officers 
when they did not agree with him. He was patient with the 
nation, even when he thought it had repudiated him and was about 
to throw him and his policies overboard. 

Abraham Lincoln was a man of the noblest type of magnanimity. 

He knew that Seward believed himself to be a much greater 
man than Lincoln, but he made Seward his prime minister. He 
refused to let Seward resign; he ignored Seward's haughty 
demeanor. He respected Seward, took counsel of Seward, prof- 
ited by the assistance of Seward, and found in him an invaluable 
counsellor and a loyal friend. 

Lincoln was tried almost beyond endurance by Chase. Biog- 
raphers have denounced Chase as a selfish plotter. Charnwood 
calls him a sneak, and John Drinkwater had him in mind when 
he created for the Cabinet of Lincoln his character of Burnet 
Hook. Chase was not an intentionally dishonorable man. He 
believed that he ought to have been President in 1860. He had 
fought and suffered for the freedom of the slave long before 
Lincoln had defined his opinions upon that subject. Chase be- 
lieved that one term of Lincoln was as much as the country 
could endure, and he deliberately used his own position in the 
Cabinet and his relation as father-in-law of Governor Sprague, 
and the charm and ambition of his daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, 
to make himself President, if he could, in 1864. Lincoln knew his 
schemes and disapproved them, but "hoped the country would 
never have a worse President than Chase would make." He 
held Chase in the Cabinet, not indeed to the end of his adminis- 
tration, but until his notable work as Secretary of the Treasury 
had. been so far and so well done that the country could spare 
him by accepting one of his many resignations. But when old Chief 

17 



Justice Taney died, Lincoln appointed as his successor on the 
Supreme Bench of the United States the very man who had so 
long and so often irritated him — Salmon P. Chase. 

Everyone knows the story of Lincoln's monumental patience 
with McClellan and the magnanimity with which he endured the 
timidity, the irresolution, the conceit and the hostility of that 
general. We need not here review it, but we must recall, though 
the story is familiar, his relations to Stanton. Stanton had snubbed 
him cruelly in the reaper case, and Lincoln was hurt to the heart. 
Stanton was a Democrat and had been a Cabinet officer under 
Buchanan. Stanton held Lincoln in contempt and Lincoln knew 
it. But Stanton had organizing power, and an inflexible will, 
and a sulphurous vocabulary, and a passionate loyalty. Lincoln 
made him his Secretary of War, and no man in the nation could 
have filled better that trying position. Stanton was rude to Lin- 
coln, but Lincoln won not only his support but his enduring affec- 
tion. In the terrible days of the war's greatest peril and un- 
certainty, he was always to be relied upon. When Lincoln was 
shot, hie fortitude and control of a situation that paralyzed the 
nation made him for a few hours the de facto head of the Gov- 
ernment. With the Vice-President helpless and the Secretary of 
State weltering in his own blood and apparently dying, Stanton 
quietly and with determination sat by the bedside of the Presi- 
dent, dictated the best account which has ever been written of 
the assassination, issued orders, held a steady hand on the affairs 
of the nation, and stood like a mighty rock in a stricken land. 
And when the man whom he had grown to honor and to love 
breathed his last, he uttered those undying words: "Now he 
belongs to the ages." 

IV. The Greatness in His Religious Nature 

Lincoln 's religion was inherent in the qualities that made up his 
manhood. It is true that he did not find himself at home in the 
church with which his parents were affiliated, the Baptist Church. 
It is also true that he did not unite with the Presbyterian Church 
when his wife left the Episcopal Church and joined the Presbyte- 
rian. But it is true that his religious convictions underwent a 
change in 1850 when he came under the influence of Eev. James 
Smith and read his book on the Evidences of Christianity. Three 
unimpeachable witnesses testify that Lincoln declared that that 
book had changed his religious thinking, and Lincoln knew that 
Dr. Smith claimed to have brought to him evidences which re- 
sulted in his change of view. Lincoln permitted Dr. Smith to 

IS 



circulate this report, and confirmed it to his own brother-in-law, 
Ninian W. Edwards, and when Dr. Smith gave up liis pastoral 
work on account of age, Lincoln made him U. S. Consul to Dundee, 
Scotland. If Smith lied, Lincoln not only condoned the lie !'iit 
participated in it. But he did not lie. Lincoln for the first 
time learned in logical form the evidences of Christianity and 
was profoundly impressed. 

But Lincoln's religion was not wholly or even chiefly a matter 
of his opinions on doctrinal matters. It was a development, a 
growth. 

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation he told his 
Cabinet he did not ask their opinion of the main questions, for 
he had promised his God that he would do this thing. 

Among all state papers and addresses there is none that breathes 
a deeper religious spirit than his Second Inaugural. It is re- 
ligious from beginning to end. It is not only the noblest and 
greatest of his utterances — it is the high water mark of his own 
religious convictions. 

He believed in God. He knew and honored the Bible. He be- 
lieved in prayer. He believed in God's guidance in the affairs 
of men and nations. He believed in duty and immortality. Out 
of his authentic utterances could be formulated a creed, and it 
would not be an unworthy or unattractive creed. Abraham Lin- 
coln was a Christian. 

V. The Greatness in His Power to Influence His Own and 
Succeeding Generations 

Like most great men, Lincoln suffered in his own age a divided 
judgment. The tests of greatness in politics are not immediate 
and undisputable. Lincoln was denounced in his own day in 
terms which I should not like to repeat, so bitter, cruel and 
unjust were they. But he was able to hold men in working re- 
lationships and to accomplish his purposes and perform his per- 
manent tasks. In the best sense he was an opportunist. He 
combined vision with practical sagacity. He was subtle and at 
times stubborn. He was pliable and in time of need adamant. 
He was a man of strong and contradictory qualities. 

Lincoln was not a radical. He was a conservative. As an 
advocate of anti-slavery his constant appeal was to the fathers 
of the Eepublic, who, while recognizing the inevitability of 
slavery, believed it a moral wrong and desired its extinction. 
He Avas slow to leave the Whig Party. Even in IS.").! lie wrote 
to Speed that he believed himself to be a Whig. But the Whig 

19 



Party was already dead. Of its seven candidates, it had elected 
only two, Harrison and Taylor, and both of thern had died early. 
It drew to itself the ablest men in the nation, north and south, 
but it did not succeed in defining its issues in terms that com- 
pelled assent. 

Lincoln was unmethodical and disorderly in his office and un- 
systematic in his work of preparation for his cases. But he had 
a singular ability to discriminate in his mental processes between 
the essential and non-essential. 

This process he carried over into his moral judgments. He 
believed in a government dedicated to equality of rights before 
the law. We are much more likely to think ourselves the equal 
of Lincoln than to think humbler men our equals. Lincoln faced 
honestly the full implications of his convictions. 

Lincoln was an American. He epitomized in his life the whole 
of American history. He was born in a log cabin. He became 
President of the United States. He lived through backwoods life 
in Kentucky, pioneer life in Indiana, small town life in New 
Salem, the life of a State Capital in Springfield; and at Wash- 
ington he shared and was a part of the life of the whole nation. 

We never think of him as southern. We think of him as Amer- 
ican. He belongs to Kentucky, to Indiana, to Illinois, but he 
belongs to the whole United States of America. 

But he does more than this. It is remarkable that side by side 
with the growth of America 's own appreciation of him has ap- 
peared a new sense of his world citizenship. England claims him 
and so do all free nations. His biography has been published not 
only in innumerable editions in the United States, but in England, 
Prance, Spain, Germany, Holland, Bussia, Italy, Turkey, China, 
Japan, Hawaii and South America. 

He belongs to the world. 

The noblest statue of him, that of St. Gaudens, stands in Chicago 
and forever interprets to the world his features, stature and noble 
appearance. But in Newark stands the statue of Gutzon Gorglum, 
with Lincoln seated on a bench. There the working man may sit 
beside him and eat out of his dinner pail, and little children 
climb upon his knees. 

But Great Britain demands a St. Gaudens, and a replica of 
his noble Lincoln is erected near Westminster Hall and the Abbey. 
And other European nations have and ever will have his monu- 
ment. And they all know his name and know his character. 
Abraham Lincoln is not only America's greatest American — he is 
the first world citizen of modern times. 

20 



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